The living Dickens

When Emily Dickinson wrote, I never saw a Moor/I never saw the seas/Yet I know how the Heather looks/And what a billow be," (Listening Post) by Moor she meant a stretch of land filled with heather and not as Mr. Black claims "the most exotic of all humans...the Moor (a term for mixed Arab/Berber Moslems of North Africa)." Moor in the sense used by Mr. Black comes from the Greek mauros and means black, dark whereas moor in the sense used by Dickinson comes from Anglo-Saxon (whence by the by comes English--you know, the language we seem to be bumping up against) and is akin to mere meaning lake and morass which here seems somehow apt.

In this bit of poetry Dickinson couples seas with billow and moor with heather. Dickinson knows what a billow is even though she's never seen a moor. What possible link could be had between Mr. Black's Moor, that butt of the Crusades, and Dickinson's subsequent affirmation of (Christian) faith? Further, how can Mr. Black possibly wedge Moor into what amounts to a simple bit of parallelism?

He can do it because he mistakes current conventions of grammar for past conventions. Nowadays we capitalize Moor meaning mauros but we do not capitalize moor meaning a stretch of land full of heather (unless the word begins a sentence). In days long gone we were not so rigorous in our distinctions. The matter is made more difficult by the fact that the punctuation of Dickinson,s poetry is notoriously idiosyncratic. Even so, careful reading and a good dictionary ought to have prevented this mare's nest.

DENNIS L. FIDDLE

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